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Adventures in Bookland: The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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Hands down, the best popular account of what it says in the title on the bookshelves today. What makes this so good is Morris’s brilliant balancing of a consideration of the sources with the narrative imperatives of telling the story of what actually happened. That he does this so masterfully is shown by the fact that, until it was over and I was thinking back over it for the purposes of writing a review, I didn’t even realise just how he’d pulled off the hardest trick of writing history: embedding a consideration of the sources in the narrative without stopping the narrative dead in its tracks. Well done, Marc Morris!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Well, it’s a bit dull, really. I know, I know: up to now, one of the iron rules of books about exorcism is that they’re never dull. Mad, sometimes; eccentric, usually; gripping, almost without exception. Almost. This is the exception. And, as such, it is probably much more truthful about the subject than Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, which is much more involving,  considerably better written and altogether more serious, but I suspect leans so far towards the exceptional as to make it useless as an insight into the normal working of the devil in human lives.

The sort of exorcisms portrayed in The Rite are much more humdrum – and much, much more drawn out. Indeed, I’m reminded of people undergoing thoroughgoing psychoanalysis, a process that demands one or two sessions a week for, quite literally, years, without any guarantee of wholeness at the end. Indeed, since psychoanalysis can be considered as a distorted mirror of religious paths, there might be even more to this comparison than is first apparent.

It’s strength as a book is that it does an excellent job of unglamourising evil: it’s here displayed in all its tawdry tedium. You know that old saying that the devil’s greatest trick is getting the world to believe he doesn’t exist? It’s not true. His greatest trick is persuading writers, artists and almost everyone else that he’s the doomed, defiant figure of Miltonic imagination. I’m not sure of the source (possibly Malachi Martin, which shows what a good writer he was) but someone said the best way to think of the devil was as a reptilian intelligence stuck forever in a repeating pattern of destruction.

So, this book’s great virtue is that no one will go away from reading it thinking that the devil has all the best tunes. All he has is the same old, same old, to the world’s ending. And the men, the priests, meeting him in this struggle have to have the constancy, and the ability to resist the tedium, that this most boring of all angels inflicts upon those he is trying to possess.

God bless them for it.

Adventures in Bookland: An Exorcist Tells His Story by Gabriele Amorth

2 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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All right, let me be honest here from the off (rather than the middle or the end). The late Fr Amorth was a bit mad.

But before you nod sagely, thinking that was only to be expected of a man who professed to have performed well over a hundred thousand exorcisms during his years of ministry, let me hasten to add that that wasn’t the root of his madness. No, his madness is one I recognise, and it’s one peculiar and particular to a certain class of Italian intellectual: it’s the madness of unrecognition stoked by the frustration of years of unrecognised labour. Italy is a country and culture where intellectual and cultural achievement is admired: to be called ‘Il Professore’ or ‘Il Dottore’ is a great distinction. To be denied recognition for labours strikes at the core of such an Italian.

Fr Amorth was such an Italian. He laboured in a lonely and unappreciated ministry for decades, with virtually no support from bishops or brother priests, and there lies the root of the slight tinge of madness that runs through this book. I don’t believe it has anything to do with the abyss he stared into in his vocation, pulling back people dangling over the pit. In fact, the repetitiveness of his work is strongly suggestive of its validity, for evil is, by its nature, uncreative, repeating the same patterns of fall over and over and over again. Only the good creates. Evil merely spoils.

Hopefully, in heaven, Fr Amorth can see that his work is now much more appreciated and even bishops (an old saying famously remarked that the paths of hell are paved with their skulls) have come to realise the necessity of taking the devil and all his works seriously.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Blood and Blade by Matthew Harffy

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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In Blood and Blade, Matthew Harffy’s recreation of the violent and crucial decades of 7th-century Britain reaches a new depth and resonance. His hero, Beobrand, is a man whose soul has been as much branded by the events of the previous two books as his body has been battered by them – and how good it is to have an action hero not shake off wounds as lightly as a shower of rain. In this book, Beobrand has to travel the path his wyrd has placed him on, between competing kingdoms and the collision of religions. Harffy handles the many action scenes with his customary skill and realism – this is not a book for the faint hearted – but it is in the portrayal of the relationship between Beobrand and a lowly thrall that the author reveals a deepening appreciation of the human condition and how, even in the midst of the most violent of times, people will strive for love and human contact.

Adventures in Bookland: Recce by Koos Stadler

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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A profound paradox lies at the heart of this book, a paradox not even hinted at in its subtitle (“Small team missions behind enemy lines”), although it is mentioned, without comment, in the book’s blurb. For while it is an intriguing and insightful examination of the specialised and deadly world of special forces’ operations, what is skated over is who these special forces were and what they were fighting against.

The special forces were part of the South African army and they were fighting the guerillas of SWAPO, the organisation struggling to free South West Africa (now Namibia) from the racist control of the apartheid regime in Pretoria. And the author of Recce, Koos Stadler, was one of the men fighting to preserve that regime.

For some, that in itself might disqualify the book from reading lists, but that would be to miss another of the paradoxes at the book’s heart: while the author is fighting to defend the indefensible, reading Recce brings the reader to the slow realisation that good men can be committed to fighting for what is wrong. For Stadler is undoubtedly a good man and a good soldier, serving his country, his people and his God as best he knows how. Nor is he, the servant of a racist regime, in any way racist himself: how could he be, when in the long border war he served alongside so many black African soldiers, creating the sorts of bonds of mutual trust and friendship that staring into the face of death together forge between men.

And this reveals the book’s final paradox: how many black Africans fought alongside the South African army against the guerillas of SWAPO. So the book’s final lesson is that, even in the struggle against apartheid, things are never just black and white.

Adventures in Bookland: The Path to War by Michael Neiberg

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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At the dawn of the 20th century, the United States was a power hiding behind oceans. In the first decades of the 21st century, it is the world’s only hyperpower, able to project its military and cultural influence to every corner of the world. This fascinating book – at least, it’s fascinating for those with an interest in the political and sociological history of America – tells how America made the decisive turn towards engagement with the outside world.

It may be hard to realise now, but through most of its history, isolationism has been the strongest strand to America’s foreign policy. Its founders and first generations of immigrants crossed the sea to escape the wars and persecutions – political and religious – of the Old World. Having found a home in the New World, they had no wish to engage in the wars of their old homes. So when the First World War broke out, America remained neutral. Not only did this keep it out of the war, neutrality brought huge profits in its wake, as American goods and products found ready markets among all the combatants.

But such blood profits sat uneasily on American consciences, bought as they were in the immolation of a continent that many Americans still thought of as home. For none was this problem more acute than for German-Americans. Where did their loyalty lie? At first, they pushed for continued American neutrality. But as the war continued and incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania increased anti-German feeling, such a position became increasingly untenable. War was coming. And German-Americans, in common with Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and the other national groups, came to the one, common conclusion: they were Americans before they were anything else. Thus, the First World War killed off the 19th-century American experiment in multiculturalism (played out in a multitude of national-language newspapers and societies) and ushered in a new consciousness of what it was to be American.

Neiberg tells the story of this profound change through an encyclopaedic knowledge of the time, ranging from popular songs, through speeches and newspaper articles, to the letters of people ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to ordinary mothers contemplating the possibility of their sons being called up. It’s a great piece of scholarship – but only bother with reading it if you’re interested in the subject.

Adventures in Bookland: King Cnut by WB Bartlett

31 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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Ask the man in the street how many times England has been successfully invaded and he’ll reply, “Twice: the Romans and the Normans.” Ask a historian, particularly one specialising in constitutional history, and he’ll add a third: William and Mary’s invasion in 1688.

They’re all wrong. There have been at least five successful invasions of England. These three, plus the slow-motion carving out of an England separate from Britain by the Anglo-Saxons and then, fifty years before the one date in English history everyone knows, the Vikings finally succeeded in what they’d been trying to do for the previous 150 years: grab the country.

This long-overdue book is about the Viking invasions that first crippled and then ended the reign of England’s worst-ever king, Æthelred, and the man who finally succeeded him, Cnut. In Denmark, his homeland, Cnut’s name is invariably followed by his appellation, ‘the Great’, but in England, where he spent most of his adult life and where he was buried, he is all but forgotten, his fame as a conqueror eclipsed by the man who followed him, fifty years later. Bartlett’s book seeks to redress that balance and it does a good job of demonstrating what a remarkable king Cnut was, holding together a sea-spanning empire encompassing Denmark, England, Norway and much of Sweden.

As a sea pirate with imperial pretensions, Cnut did all that he could to ensure the history makers of his time – the clerks of the Church – were on his side, as well as doing what he could in later life to atone for the judicious murders of his early life that had made his grasp of the crown more secure. The book is thorough in its exploration of the man and his time, although a little on the bloodless side. This is no fault of the author, but rather inherent in the limited contemporary sources – mainly chronicles and charters – which do not lend themselves to rounded character portraits. Later Norse sagas add colour but the careful historian, and Bartlett is careful, has to be cautious about adding these details to what is a sober assessment of England’s forgotten conqueror.

And the tide story? First related by Henry of Huntingdon in the 12th century (a century after Cnut’s death).

 

Adventures in Bookland: Xenos by Dan Abnett

29 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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There are so many wonderful books out there, I seldom go back and reread a book I’ve read before. Why bother, when new worlds and new ideas are waiting to be explored? But, with Xenos, I’ve done just that: gone back and reread a book I first read six or seven years ago.

And it was great.

Xenos was the very first novel I read set in the Warhammer 40k universe. If you don’t know it, it’s a universe set up explicitly so that wargamers moving little plastic figures, often exquisitely painted, can play war games set in the far future. Given that the people playing the games are wargamers, you might surmise that the universe 38,000 years from now is not a particularly peaceful place. You’d be right. It is, however, a universe stuffed full of wonders. It turns out that all those goblins and elves and monsters that filled our fairy tales and folk stories were real – it’s just that we got the location wrong. They weren’t on earth, they were waiting for us out among the stars. In fact, that’s my only real criticism of the intricate universe that Games Workshop (the company behind Warhammer 40K) has created: with such a cast of creatures, there should be a bit of room for wonder in among the blasters and exploding alien heads.

But, no matter, for Dan Abnett manages to instil some of this wonder while remaining true to the dystopian roots of 40k and, at the same time, writing an amazingly involving adventure story. Indeed, so taken with the whole universe was I when I first read this that I immediately dived in, reading reams of the stuff, until I came to the same sort of realisation about Warhammer 40k books that I came to with fantasy and Tolkien. Back when I first read The Lord of the Rings it was actually the first fantasy novel I’d ever read. And I was completely blown away. So, I dived in, only to all but drown in Shannaras and Covenants and Belgeriads. I emerged, somewhat the worse for wear, to claim the hard-won knowledge that, with fantasy, I’d started at the summit and was busy working my way down. It turns out that, with Warhammer 40k and Dan Abnett, I’d done the same thing: I’d started at the top with Abnett and had been working my way downhill after him.

But, to return to the summit, it was a relief to reclimb the mountain to find the view from the top as exotic and brutal and breathtaking as the first time I’d found myself there. Thank you, Dan Abnett, and thank you, Gregor Eisenhorn. The Imperium is well served with both of you in its service!

 

 

Adventures in Bookland: St Augustine’s First Footfall by Gerald Moody

28 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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This slim (87 page) book does exactly what it says in its subtitle: An Investigation into the Probable Location of the Landing Site of Augustine’s Mission in 597 AD. Of course, the really fascinating thing is why Augustine (the missionary sent by Pope Gregory the Great to bring the pagan and barbarian Angl0-Saxons into the fold of civilisation) should land right where, in centuries before and afterward, visitors and invaders ranging from the Emperor Claudius, through Hengist and Horsa, all manner of Vikings and, even would-be invaders such as Napoleon and Hitler, all made first footfall.

The answer lies in part in geography. Yes, Dover is closer to France, but it is exposed and has great towering cliffs standing over it: a particularly vulnerable place to make a landing. The great secret to landing where Augustine, and so many others, landed, is that the Isle of Thanet really was an island back then, a chalk hill cut off from the rest of Kent by the Wantsum Channel. In places, this channel was a mile wide, and up until the 15th century a ferry trip was still needed to get to Thanet. But the Wantsum silted up, joining Thanet to the mainland. However, while Thanet was an island, it provided a unique, and uniquely defensible, entry point to England.

In this book, Gerald Moody, deputy director of the Trust for Thanet Archaeology, employs the latest research into how Thanet’s coastline has changed to investigate just where Augustine and his team of Italian missionaries landed in 597 AD. According to our chronicler of the event, Bede, Augustine and crew were detained on Thanet while the king of Kent, Æthelberht, decided what to do with these strange visitors. Moody does an excellent job of examining the historical account through the lens of modern archaeology, and makes a convincing case for his siting of the landing and the location of Augustine’s stay on Thanet.

In short, an absorbing and detailed little book, well worth reading for anyone interested in the particulars (Augustine’s mission) or the general (England’s changing coastline).

Adventures in Bookland: 1847 by Turtle Bunbury

19 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Before reviewing this book I must do something unusual: I must review the author’s name. Has there ever been a better name bestowed upon a writer? I  aver that there has not. It is the juxtaposition of dissimilarity that makes it so unique, the elision of armoured testudo with cricketing rabbits, the juxtaposition of slow, considered movement with the sparkle of celebrity sport. Surely such a name tells of parental genius. The question arises though: can the writer live up to his name?

Almost. The title tells the tale. It’s the story of a year, a year rendered significant for the Turtle as the time when the building of his family home, a great pile of a place in County Carlow, Ireland, was begun. Not perhaps the most obvious time to start such a project, as Ireland was in the midst of the Great Famine that saw a million people die and a million more emigrate. But, as the Turtle shows in this book, such a year will reverberate through the world, setting off ripples in all sorts of unexpected places. Bunbury follows the year through, telling its history through the lives of people affected by the events of the year. Some are Irish, part of the diaspora already gone from the island but, hearing the news, responding to it. Others merely share the calendar.

This tells the book’s strength and weakness. It’s a chronicle, connected only by time and, when finishing it, one is struck by the same thought that arises upon watching Stephen Fry on QI. Yes, it’s all very witty and sharp, but what, exactly, is the point? If wit and sharpness are reason enough then buy this book: it will delight. If, on the other hand, you require some uniting, narrative thread for your explorations in the 19th century, read the Flashman books instead.